Hi all
A while back I gave Flightgear a shot, liked it and tried making a portable version.
It worked half but I couldnt redirect the APPDATA variable to the usb drive. I tried redirecting it the same way I did it with lots of other Apps but it didn't work.
I am at the end of my knowledge here and it would be cool if I would find someone willing to take a look at it and see if I made any errors of if maybe there is an other way of doing it.
I know its a huge package but I'd like it anyhow 
Thanks!
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You can move it back and forth the way we do with registry entries.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I just like the redirect better
I think its safer/better/faster.
But if there is no other way of doing it I will move them.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Just for the record, I looked in their CVS repository and it seems like you should be able to override it with the environment variable FG_HOME. (I told Simeon in IRC.)
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Doesnt work.
I run a program called fgrun.exe before. Its a tool where you can set choose Airplanes and such using in a grafical program so there is no need to do it using the commandline.
My guess is that this is causing it. I have to look further into this.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Once the executable which matters is running, open up Process Explorer and have a look at its image, the Environment tab - it'll tell you what the program's environment is at the moment.
By my look at the code APPDATA should have worked - it does
:: getenv("APPDATA")rather than the special ShGetFolderLocation on CSIDL_APPDATA thing - so I'm not entirely surprised that FG_HOME isn't working.I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
yes. Appdata is set the right way. But the fgrun.exe shows a file in which your airports are stored. That file is problem I think. Changing that path is my next objective
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
fg v 1.00 probably has less system resource usage and I don't think uses OpenAL (for audio). We could possibly make the wave files lower quality. Take out a bunch of aircraft, all the docs except licensing, Use UPX to compress the binary exe files.
For the registry settings they are probably set off by the setup file, some like the uninstaller.
For the fgrun registry we could run batch files to fgfs.exe
for your suggestions. I basically stopped investing any time into flightgear portable as its too much work in my opinion. And its a very big package so not many people will use it I think.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
One issue I have with the regular flight-gear is that even running it from a hard-drive the game sometimes seems to take at least 5 minutes to load. I shudder to think what load times would be like from a Flash drive. I assume the game has to only do a major load once but I tried playing the tutorials and those either don't work or take even longer to load. Naturally, any time you change the scenario (aircraft, scenary etc) the game has to load again too.
All in all it's a pretty frustrating package and a very hardcore flight sim to boot, so doesn't really strike me as the type of thing you'd load up for a quick 5 minute fly. Not that I'm opposed to hardcore flight sims, but I would be inclined to agree that if it's not something that can be done easily then it's probably not worth doing.
Just my two cents worth.
its too tricky and too big of a package.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Interesting thread, I was just about to post a question along these lines - that is, what is to be done about large file/dir moves, necessitated as a result of APPDATA or USERPROFILE either not working or their use leading to 'orphan' files/folders - from other applications using the same VARS.
At first I imagined that PAL somehow re-directed calls for variables such that other programs were not aware of VAR changes. Unfortunately this is not the case, coincidentally "Thinapp/Thinstall" suffers from similar problems, and is an issue that one encounters regularly(2 out of 3 for me).
Along with the ability to account for services this is top of my wish list.
It occurred to me that a possible solution to large [FILE\DIRMOVE]'s is to create temporary symbolic links - to the location where the app expects the files. I understand that FAT32 does not support them and most USB drives come pre-formatted with it - however this is a minor point as the drive can be converted to NTFS.
What do you think Chris?
It's not plausible. Lack of OS support is the biggest thing, but there also can be some stability issues with it. Search the forums and you'll find out it's been discussed before.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
I got flight gear 1 to work ok on my netbook, It works with a batch file and doesn't write to the Vista appdata folder. It is currently about 102 MB zipped. I can post a mediafire link, and you could look it over and upload an Official version for the site, but for the donation can you have a button and put it to the Haiti relief fund or sponsoring a child like on the flightgear DVD page? http://www.flightgear.org/dvd/
Update:
I removed the info, some people are unethically commercially charging alot of money for flightgear under the name ProFlight Sim... not good. Don't want people to unethically use GPL licenses